TCS Daily

Reform Follows Function

Last Saturday, a New York City police officer was lowered by rope to a window in a Harlem
apartment house. Inside the window he could see a 425-pound Bengal
tiger, an animal that -- along with an eight-foot caiman, a member of
the crocodile family of reptiles -- had been living in the apartment
for several months, the "pet" or "companion" of a man named Antoine
Yates. The police officer shot a dart into the tiger and, after a few
minutes, shot a second dart into him, by which the tiger, Ming, was
fully tranquilized and sleeping blissfully.

The
policeman then could have shot the tiger with a bullet to its brain, if
that had been Police Department policy, but the plan was quite
different, and the officer called the appropriate animal welfare people
who carted the tiger to Long Island and from there to a wild animal reserve in Ohio. The point is that, without ceremony or debate, this tiger could have been done away with in "a New York minute."

That was Saturday. On Monday, The New York Times
published a front-page story -- running to 2,500 words in all --
headlined "Critics Say Execution Drug May Hide Suffering." The gist of
the story is that the drug that is used in many states for lethal
injections causes excruciating pain, despite the fact that the
condemned person shows all the outward signs of a painless, peaceful
death. The problem is that pancuronium bromide, one of the ingredients
of the death cocktail, "could lead to paralysis that masks intense
distress, leaving a wide-awake inmate unable to speak or cry out as he
slowly suffocates."

Now, of all the controversial issues confronting America,
it seems that this one could be resolved the most easily, within a few
minutes. The whole idea of lethal injections was thought up by liberal
reformers who, instead of leaving well enough alone, wanted to make
executions as painless and sensitive as possible. For centuries,
capital offenders were either hung or shot. The electric chair came
into popularity at the turn of the last century, but the reason for its
appearance was largely a commercial one, a prop in the war between
providers of AC and DC current. At the same time, the French were still
using the guillotine, which did the job quickly and efficiently, and
with a certain panache.

As we all know, thanks to Hollywood
and the tabloid press, the Mafia has no problem executing people with
as much or as little bloodshed as desired, but often it's done with a
bullet to the temple or back of the head. Sometimes the killers like to
stick the gun in the victim's mouth. In any event, it's all over in a
few seconds.

So
why do we -- as a society -- have so much trouble executing people who
deserve to be executed? It's because we want to distance ourselves from
the act, we want to show some "compassion," we don't want to appear to
be cold-hearted brutes, we want to show that, even in handing out death
certificates, we are civilized. And here, of course, as in so many
other areas in which we want to perform our "good works," the Law of
Unforseen Consequences" takes over. Instead of reducing pain and
suffering, our goal, we increase pain and suffering.

An
important part of the rationale for the electric chair and now the
lethal injections is that they increase the amount of ceremony and
process into the execution. The more process, the more opportunities
for mistakes and delays, and that is exactly what the reformers want.
There have been innumerable stories in the press about innocent people
on death row, but the fact is that not one innocent person, to anyone's
knowledge, has been executed. What the accurate story might be is that
there are innocent people on death row (just as in all likelihood there
have been far more innocent people who have died after serving lifetime
jail sentences) but to date, because of the exhaustive appeals process,
none has been executed. And the persons whose trials were faulty are
too often proclaimed "innocent" whereas their guilt or innocence is not
the issue but rather the conduct of the trial.

Why
all of this remains an "issue," entailing a long investigative piece in
The New York Times, defies logic. Anyone who has had general anesthesia
for an operation knows full well that the surgeon could take a gun and
kill the patient without the patient feeling any pain. Even an IV of
valium could do the job, preparing the condemned for the coup de grace.
But this is too easy, too quick, too insensitive for the reformers, who
want to create a "compassionate" process that undoubtedly will leave
opportunities for more stays, more reviews, more mistakes. No, a
blindfold and a cigarette (except in Bloomberg's New York) is better, and best of all is an old-fashioned Mickey Finn and a blast in the back of the head. Now that's compassion.